Session (43) Virtual Open Studio

Please join us for Open Studios with Alena Graedon, Dove Hays, and Kristen Jensen. Time has flown and our Session 43 Fellows are heading into their last week in residence with us. The studios are filled with new work and we hope you’ll join us on ZOOM to see it and hear about our Fellows time on the island.

To join, please email [email protected] for an invitation.

Alena Graedon’s first novel, The Word Exchange, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus, Electric Literature, and Tor. It has been translated into eight languages. Graedon’s nonfiction has been published in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Believer magazine, and Guernica, among other places, and her short fiction has appeared in VICE magazine. Graedon has twice received fellowships from MacDowell, as well as from The Corporation of Yaddo, The Ucross Foundation, The Jentel Artist Residency, The Lighthouse Works, VCCA, and The Vermont Studio Center. A native of North Carolina, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s MFA program. She has taught at Columbia and Monmouth universities, and she lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Dove Zenaida Hays is a painter and sculptor known for her subtle, pastel-hued palette and soft matte surfaces. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including recent exhibitions curated by Young Space (Brooklyn, NY) and by Warbling Collective (London, UK). She has shown in a two-person exhibition with Sadie Halie Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and with every iteration of the Every Woman Biennial (New York, NY). Raised in Baltimore, MD, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, to attend Pratt Institute and later earned an MFA from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She lives in New York, NY with her rescue cat, Starling Cormorant, and maintains a studio practice in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.

Kristen Jensen is an artist living and working in Queens, New York. Her practice is interdisciplinary, often taking quotidian experiences and domestic objects and reinterpreting them in diverse mediums. In the summer of 2019 she was awarded a fellowship through the Jerome Foundation to work at St. John’s pottery in Minnesota as well as a scholarship to attend Watershed residency. Recent shows include a solo exhibition “Lighter, Later” and performance “Some Grace ll” at 17ESSEX in New York City and “Everything Speaks” with Ben Dowell at GEARY. She has also exhibited domestically and internationally at Simone Subal, Wallspace, Nicelle Beauchene, and Bortolami Gallery among others. Jensen was an Abrons AIRspace resident in 2016-2017, an AIR at Shandaken Projects at Storm King in 2016, and led a performative painting and sculpture workshop titled “Enable Uncontrol” as part of the Wanderings & Wonderings series at Storm King Art Center in the fall of 2017.